Building A 100+ Year Legacy + Peter Thiel’s Fellowship + Bomb Hiring Questions

i wanna tell you something so i have a family now and do you have a will red flex alright yes i do have a will okay so once i have a family like you start getting into the will stuff right and it's kind of been screwing with me and i read a story last week that has maybe changed my life and i think that if only a couple of listeners actually buy into what i'm buying into this could be like the most like life thing that we've ever done on his podcast i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a less travel never so in the eighteen hundreds in sweden there is a guy named alfred and alfred was an inventor adventure and he had a little bit of success where he started inventing some like a bunch of small stuff but then when he was like thirty or forty he had something that changed his life so he basically found out that nit if you mess with it in a certain way you can make it explosive and thus was the creation of dynamite and so it made him incredibly rich so he got super rich he was worth something like the equivalent of two or three hundred million dollars in today's money and towards the end of his life his brother ludwig died and when his brother died someone ran an obituary for alfred on accident they used the wrong brother and the obituary started with the merchant of death is no longer and they go on to explain how alfred created dynamite and how it was revolutionized the way people were murdered now whether that story is true or false that's actually up to debate no one has disprove it but there's like people are like i'm not sure if that's actually true but that's the story and afterwards alfred changed his life he goes that's that's ridiculous i can't be known as the person who is the merchant of death i have to change this and so two years before he died he decided to rewrite his will and he left ninety five percent of his assets towards towards it's a foundation where he created the rules and the rules were i'm gonna give and this is i'm using today's money but it's a it's the equivalent money back then i'm gonna give one million dollars to the person who impacted humanity the most the category that i wanna start with is piece but after piece we're gonna do a few other categories we're gonna do piece we're gonna do chemistry economics and literature and thus became the nobel peace price and to this day it's lasted for you know a hundred and thirty years where they now have like six hundred million dollars in assets and the whole point of the foundation is we invest enough money so we are always able to give something like the equivalent of a five million dollars a year to some type of person who has impacted the world the most and winners have been like marie curry martin luther king ernest hemingway like a lot of these like pretty like groundbreaking people and in a way this contest it it's encouraged like don't think there's too many people that are doing some stuff just to win the nobel peace prize but in the back of their head they're like yeah like that would be amazing if like i can like discover something and like you know that's like the ultimate goal like to get a nobel peace prize i guess like the greatest pricing thing ever and so it kind of changed my life by the way did you know that story that dynamite story in a merchant of death not the specifics i had heard peter taylor was talking about this with joe rogan like yeah the sort of white washing of a reputation and they were talking about epstein they were talking about bill gates and ro brought up he's like that's how the nobel prize happened and then he's like if you heard that but he was yeah you know the dynamite guy but i didn't know anything beyond that so that's actually pretty didn't know the merchant of death obituary story so the truth of it is that like dynamite actually wasn't used to kill that many people because of the way it works like like tnt a lot of people but like so like open up caves for mining and shit right it was like so that's where like the story is like a you know who knows but we don't let the truth get in the way of a good story yeah but what is true is that the nobel peace prize has worked like it's encouraged people and like do incentives to do stuff sorry so explain the money side of this so he left how much money to this and then is it just been draining from that pot or does new money get injected into the nobel prep is it's a million dollars per prize is that right yeah and there's five per year and like one year during the world world war two they were like we don't have peace so we're not gonna give a peace prize and so they like this didn't give a prize and so but in general every year for last hundred and twenty years they've done this and so the money right now it's six they this is all public so you could see it they have six hundred and twelve million dollars it made a ten point seven percent return on capital in two thousand twenty three it's invested in equity funds hedge funds and the way that it's set up according to his will was make sure that the money never runs try so we can always give we can always give this away for potentially hundreds of years right and so there's like a organization i think and you could see what their expenses are i think their expenses to run this thing are like three or or eight million dollars i forget exactly the single digit millions per year to operate and then they give away roughly five million dollars per year and is this like forbes thirty to thirty or like how legit are the winners of the demo piece drive i've never paid too much attention to it do you have a sense of like is this high signal or it's high like a hijacked thing that now is isn't not high signal anymore so my opinion is very high signal so albert einstein martin luther decaying marie curry like these like legit people have done it now there have been a few times where they've made mistakes so for example now they have a rule where they actually want to give the award a couple years after the person made the discovery because in nineteen twenty six they gave the award to someone who created this enzyme that cured cancer and obviously that wasn't true but like six months after they discovered that they thought it was true and then the other criticism is they have a liberal bias and so they've given one to barack obama they've given one to i believe an israeli guy once like a peace award and the and then the people who sided with palestine are like what the hell that's right there's real peace so there's criticism sometimes but in general it's very well regarded although a lot of people criticize it as being too academic or too liberal but i think it's like as legit as it could be and what what's your take on this so awesome story so here's my take my take is that this prize setup is awesome and let me give you a few examples of this so inspired by the nobel peace prize in nineteen nineteen there was this guy named raymond or tease i think his name is or let's come tag raymond or tag and so he was like hey these planes that we're we've created are pretty amazing but we're not doing like too many great things with them he goes i'm gonna offer twenty five thousand dollars to anyone out there who can fly from new york city to paris this was in nineteen nineteen you know for twenty five grand that's like five hundred grand today and like eight people signed up and seven of them fail in in fact five of them die now who's the one person who made it charles lin and the year after charles lin did his flight it says that airline passengers before he did it that year were five thousand a few years after three hundred thousand and it completely changed the airline industry because it made like a big lot on a big deal or whatever then inspired by that prize this guy named peter dia is that a name yep he created this thing called the x prize where he was like i offer ten million dollars i think the rules where anyone who can fly a rocket into space bring it back down in two weeks later it goes right back into space so like reusable rockets and elon musk at the time i think spacex was two years old he said the x prize basically helped create the commercial space industry it showed that you didn't have to be a giant aerospace company to make progress since space and it definitely influence influenced the direction i took with spacex x so this was like a big deal for like space and now the genius of the x prize was that you by putting up ten million and i think it became twenty million for the prize people would like a bunch twenty teams would invest two million each in try to develop the thing to win the ten million dollar prize and so you would get forty million invested for a ten million price so it was a kind of genius way to spur innovation and investment so not just people who wanna win the prize because that's obvious put a prize that people will try to go win it but actually in the act of winning it more dollars got poured in because they saw clear return and the math worked out where oh wow i get leverage my ten actually becomes a hundred invested in this mission if i get enough an interest around it along with the p r along with the the want to just win and to make this exciting and so it it works so now there's a spacex prize that elon has funded where it's a hundred million dollars for someone who if by two thousand thirty they can remove a certain amount of carbon from the planet or or something like that and so it's still ongoing here's another example so and you know what da is have you heard da it stands for defense advanced research projects agency have you heard that yeah weren't they like responsible for creating the internet they've done a bunch of stuff and so in that in two thousand three they created this thing called the grand prize and the idea was we have a hundred and fifty mile road trip or like a route and the first person who can create an autonomous vehicle that can drive that route wins one million dollars and a hundred and sixteen teams or something that applied and for a little out no one did it but then a team did it and that's when the first time we ever used the lidar which is a type of self driving technology that all the cars or many of the cars have it was already existed but it was applied to cars for the first time ever and so it was very successful and then there's actually a guy who i think maybe you might know this guy his name is matt friedman he's he's a really good guy to follow a really interesting guy he's doing a lot of stuff with ai investing right now and i know about this prize that he's got it's really cool i believe it's what's the right phrase is it her text so basically i think it was like one of the there's an explosion in i think italy you know it was is it morph yeah it was mount exploded and all of these ancient greek texts got basically ruined and he puts up a prize to where if you can create you basically have to use machine learning if you can create this algorithm that can help him dissect part parts of the text he'll give you a prize yeah so it's like a scroll that is like been almost sealed you can't un unscrew it just read it so what they're using is computer vision to try to analyze it from the outside and just from like the little bits you can see and try to figure out what was written i think this is gonna be like the earliest written text or something like that i forgot i don't know the details i somebody could go look this up but i remember hearing about this and thinking wow this was so cool like he can he sort of found this thing nobody was gonna be a nobody was going to justify the investment they would take to see this because you also don't know what's inside you don't know if there's anything interesting inside necessarily and he decided to you know fund this competition and i guess what happened recently was somebody figured out how to read a bit it actually they had like a breakthrough in the cvs prize where somebody figured out how to read a little bit of the thing from like some stupidly simple technique on of computer vision yeah and so it's still a thing by the way and like people are still getting after it and then the last thing is there's a thing called ka c competitions yeah where it was a startup that raised twelve million dollars it was eventually bought by google according to their website they've had nineteen million engineers compete in their competitions and if you're a company you could put a bounty out there and people will compete to win it so for example you remember microsoft connect like the camera that you put on your xbox and it could like watch you play and somehow interact with that i believe was heavily developed by one of these competitions but then they do other things for hiv research and things like that where this game buying system has actually contributed to like big important problems and so all of this to say when you're thinking about or when i'm thinking about when i die what will happen to money you know you think about giving away the family you think about like traditional giving away do you just you just wire it to someone hope they do well i'm incredibly fascinated and interested in these competitions and they don't all need to be huge i think there's one guy who you particularly like aubrey gray where he has a twenty five thousand dollar a year if you come with some interesting breakthrough on longevity he will give you twenty five grand and then you get you get to go and meet with him right so sometimes they're huge sometimes they're not huge but i think this is like so much more leverage and the publicity and the the wanting to win it seems so much more better for society to do a contest and it's also more work but than just giving you know what i mean hundred percent so i love this topic and there's a bunch of interesting angles by the way can i read you the just the thing because i think it's pretty fascinating yeah yeah they were able to take four passages with a hundred forty characters each and get eighty five percent of the characters readable recoverable is it just someone's like grocery list you exactly and they use you know ai blah blah i don't know all that the the the details of of this he did a good podcast with ben thompson on tech that's why heard him i'm talking about this i wish if i knew where were talking about once could have looked it up but i i heard this like six months ago i was gonna haircut and i thought i was ref fascinating so what did the trolls say you get a haircut when you have earbuds in your ears i won't go to a barber shop if they don't let me listen to something what while i'm gonna getting my haircut oh my god alright like if they try talking i'm just like hang let's count ears and by the way it falls out like four times during every haircut and i'm like sorry could you get that and they're like dude this is annoying that's why i started having a hair a guy come to my house and just do it there so i could just listen on blast but then i felt kinda weird because he was also listening to these like old max le talks from like two thousand and two and he's like what who is this why is i talking about like the future of the internet i'm like yeah it's before the internet was like that huge of a deal god that's so rude but whatever well well the quotes well back to the scrolls it's like going to a sports bar and i don't wanna talk to bart wanna watch the game that's what i'm trying that's what i'm trying to do right i i'm the customer the customer alright experience something want so it says to to to date our efforts have managed to un enroll and read about five percent of the first scroll so that's like you know the amount have had with that they've made so far the the general subject of the text is pleasure which properly understood is the highest good in their philosophy the two snippets are we're talking about i guess talking about pleasure so one author thinks as to in the case of food we do not right away believe things that are scarce to be absolutely more pleasant than those that are abundant i i don't know what's going on but it's especially say a philosophy text okay so that's pretty cool so can i tell you about my take on this so early on in the podcast i think i i had one of the ideas which was spacex or sorry the the xp prize for companies and i basically realized that a lot of companies when i when i was inside of twitch after we got acquired i was like man we had this whole situation where they were trying to build things internally but they didn't have like the best team on it they didn't have like the best focus on it they didn't have their highest sense of urgency then you have startups that are often like really high caliber teams small groups of people super high urgency super high motivation it's their baby so they they treat it like life for death whereas in a company i'm not gonna treat that way and i thought well in the end we ended up getting acquired for like you know small medium acquisition and i was like you know if i had just known upfront that they would be willing to pay for this we could've have just built it better and faster knowing that hey there's a eight figure payday on the other side of this and they would have also happily been like cool whoever can make the best version of this you get this money and we don't have to fund internally the product development and have one shot on goals so i was why wouldn't accompany that's the just said ten million bucks for the person who could build the bet the team that could build the best x and then when and the conditions are when if you hit it we have the first right to buy it you can't sell it to anybody else we get to hire you and the team and you guys get it will come on for for if busy earns out over two years and you know here's the scope of what we want so you're not guessing oh we'll will facebook want buy it's like no facebook telling you what they want and then you get twenty five teams to go try to be the winners of that prize because hey you actually don't need like a very baby venture capital like hey we're gonna take nine months and try to build this thing and try to win the prize right and i feel like that should exist i'm surprised that that doesn't exist that was the first idea second is i actually tried this so did i ever tell you about the the prize we created for milk growth no so when we were doing the milk road and we were like alright it's pretty clear that in crypto there's like you know the the money use case which is hey just like save your money in bitcoin or a currency that is not that cannot inflate it's not designed for inflation and so i get that use case but then people were talking about web three it's gonna change everything you're gonna have all these apps decentralized apps social social decentralized apps where you own your content all this crazy stuff right but nobody actually had built any of was just like a bunch of vcs talking about it in circles or lame white papers whatever the hell all that is yeah wallpapers papers and like same funding but like and then build a prototype i know we would use it right so we we we came up with an idea we were like hey how do we at milk road if we're this crypto newsletter we believe in crypto why don't we create our own little grant so we created a grant called the milk money grant this is not enough to get rich but it's a little bit of milk money right it's enough where you can justify spending like two or three months on a project and it was one eth which at the time was like maybe two or three grand and so we had i think over like two thousand submissions and we we said you could build whatever you want it's some use case or application of crypto and there was like so we ended up picking ten or twelve people so we gave away probably what what is that like you know thirty six grand and we just use our like add revenue money to like pay that i wish treated as an expense of the business and then we got to meet these people and they were super interesting young high caliber people that were building really interesting things and even though they were probably already making more than two or three grand in their job it just felt like a rhodes scholarship it felt like they got accepted that they were getting paid to do something they had an excuse to go like scratch this itch and that's the way we framed it we're like what's an it hits you wanna scratch it doesn't need to be the biggest project but something you wanted to see built that you wanna use what would it be and then people built all kinds of things and it was a fantastic experience it was honestly really really awesome and i forgot about it until now i actually it's something i i wanna do again i have a couple of ideas of what might do with it do you wanna talk about those or now i have a specific idea that i wanna fund and i wanna fund it and maybe a it's not even gonna be that big of a business so it might be just like a philanthropic way but is my my version of the young hustle grant so the other day i was sitting around us thinking about my time in college because i have a cousin who's who just got accepted into college two cousins actually and they were like what what advice did you have and i was like well what do you want do you know what you want or do you not know what you want if you don't know what you want you should just spend that time dabbling go meet a bunch of people try a bunch of things do a shadow a bunch of people go try to figure out what what the menu even is and maybe what type of stuff do you like seafood do you like steak chicken salads what do what do you want and one of them was like i know what i want i wanna be an entrepreneur and i was like cool he's like so that's why i'm doing this like business program and whatever i'm like awesome they're not gonna teach you how to be an entrepreneur entrepreneurial in college this not what's actually gonna happen there right i i know what you're thinking same thing i thought if i go to school and i get a business degree then i will you know how to run a business see run start a business and run a business it's like now that's not at all what you're gonna get out of that so i said here's the best thing you can do i said actually this is something that every college campus could have this and i think it is the best college campus business that i can think of for somebody like like me so if feels since podcast maybe be wired like me or sam and that is to create the onion for your campus so here's the here's why i don't know about you but when i was in college like the campus paper was like a big deal maybe now with like smartphones being awesome and social maybe maybe this is dead and i'm a booth there no it's still around because you love to read about yourself and your friends yeah exactly you wanna know what's going on on your campus what's the news what happened with your teams etcetera also there was like it's like the procrastination element of it where there's like sid and there's like the cross word and their shit you could do while you're in class so the camp ever i at my school at duke everybody read the duke chronic and i never thought about it i didn't even know who wrote it i didn't even consider what was going on there but if i was smart what i would have done is say i'm actually gonna create a little business here on campus i'm gonna create a duke newspaper but of course first rule of business different is better than better so i'm not gonna create just another school newspaper that's reporting just the facts i'm gonna create the onion for my campus so it's basically a news newspaper this will teach me a bunch of skills so i'll get the skills of creating a business how do you start a business i'll get the skills of content creation so copywriting humor creating a content schedule content pipeline hiring and firing people getting ad sales and ad revenue distribution how am gonna get people to to read this product differentiation marketing naming the thing and it's the perfect type of business for college because it's sandbox so i think one pressure a lot of people have when they're in college they want be entrepreneurs entrepreneur is they try to think of businesses that are like the businesses they read about on tech crunch or they like big money making things yeah i'm gonna create the next big thing and that's that's really hard and also you're a beginner you're a white belt so you don't go look the moves that black belts do necessarily maybe like learn the best white belt moves and you need a white belt business for me that was my sushi restaurant thing my my virtual sutra yours it was like the hotdog dog thing and then you're like college you know like moose business or whatever right we had little like starter businesses yet themselves are not meant to last but they teach you a whole bunch of like the core building block skills that when you lump them together is this thing called business so you're gonna encourage them to create the onion for college exactly so i want basically people who are i don't know how many college kids listen to this to be honest but if you if you are or you have a kid in college i want a hustle on every campus so like one hustle to create their version of the the campus paper and i gotta figure out the details but i'm down to basically put in some amount of money like ten grand or fifteen grand to like kickstart start people on this thing i don't think it'll take much money i think ten grand will be more than enough to to start these on several campuses and i think they should become self sustaining cash flow businesses from there and i think that the people who run these will be way far ahead and people don't even know like for example bar stool know bar started a physical paper that he like gave to colleges right and that college is exactly but yeah in boston he would so it was it was basically a physical newspaper that dave would write under i think pen names and it was if you can go find the the font is so funny it's like comic san on the internet i think he even bought or he used other people's newspaper like the free newspaper that you pull the the yeah you pull out that piece of glass and then you can grab one you know what i'm saying like i bought it look he i think he bought a few of his own and he like literally placed them on corners where it was like the box yeah yeah you know like those free newspaper things and it it was mostly a gambling newspaper it was like a gambling rag he called it and what he would do is in the morning he would write the thing or whatever he'd get it printed and then he would sorry the previous night he would write the thing get it printed it and then in the morning he would rush into the subway and he just be handing it out to people getting on the subway in boston or getting on the whatever the underground is there and that's how bar stool got its initial just recently and then he would hand him out all day then he would go home he would be calling advertisers to try to get like enough money to print the thing again and then he would write the thing under all of his pen names and work on his copyright skills then he would go get them printed to figure out a manufacturer product and the next day he would go distributed it again and over time he got like other people to hand them out and other people to write the thing and other people to do the ad sales and it became bar which is this like you know many hundred million dollar company for it for dave but that's how it started that's amazing yeah you you should go the listener you you guys should go in google and see the early ones it's pretty hilarious so i'm thinking about after this i'm gonna put up a google doc that's that's my call action i'm gonna put up a google doc figuring out what are my actual rules and who am i looking for and how to apply wait no notes of this thing i'm just gonna make go open doc anybody can can read and submit to and i'm gonna think of a name because i think the name matters and i'm also gonna i'm gonna treat like a franchise so every campus will have like the same name and convention and then we'll share the learning so if you're the kid at northwestern you're gonna be able to in some kid at duke comes up with a good distribution idea we're just gonna make one group chat where like all the people are like kind of sharing what's working and what's not and i'm really curious to see what happens and to me this is my version of like the lemonade stand it's like the slightly superior lemonade stand type of business that i think would be great i wish i had done this in college so i'll take my bow because i have successfully potentially rather prove him that this idea might be one of the bigger ones that we've ever talked about it's a it it actually is quite exciting even like you're talking ten ten thousand dollars and a newspaper which is like a silly thing but it's awesome like that's awesome and that's kind of the point with this is like these things when you rep package charity or whatever you wanna call this into a game it kinda makes it exciting it makes it fun it makes it cool yeah what's the name for this sort of action phil right it's like it's not charity for the completely impoverished but you are giving people both inspiration maybe capital and an excuse to go and better their lives or improve their lives live up to their potential like take the next step is there a name for for this where you're not it's not starving kids in africa but it is you know kind broke college kids who now have something to get excited about what what would you is there a name for something like that i gotta think about it but i would in my head i've been calling it incentivized phil that's that's too that's too much of a mouthful right so we have we have to thing about it what what this really comes down to is just a slight differing inc centralization has like massive difference in the in the outcome versus just giving versus no only one of you are guy you gonna get this and you all gotta get after it so there's a few versions of this by the way that i thought about in the past one so when the teal fellowship came out i thought it was genius peter t basically had his point of view that universities are a bubble and that we they have this halo this umbrella where you can never criticize a university of college what education it's the most important thing for our kids how dare you i thought it was crazy when i heard about it it's like education might be the fifth thing that they do and he called he's said education is a bundle and i forgot what he bundled it as but he's was like it's a insurance policy for the parent you give you make sure your kid gets this degree because that is a my kid's not gonna fall through the cracks of society insurance he's like and then it's a filtering process so he's like for companies they don't care what you learned at harvard but if harvard did a good job filtering then i already know i'm picking from you know the the smarter end of the crop when it comes to hiring so it's a filtering bundle it's a social social piece that's part of the bundle then there's the education component that's part of the bundle and he had like five or six things that he's like together those are all part of it he's like what's gonna happen is people are gonna un bundle the bundle and so what he did was he came out and said i think universities are such a waste that if you're a high potential person i will come out with the teal fellowship i will pay you a hundred and twenty grand i think it was to drop under college and if you're in college i will pay you to drop out and peter till for all of his like very smooth un ways of speaking the guy's kind of a master of communication if you just don't make them speak give it you know give a talk and you're not looking at the the poetry of at the if you read an article about his presentation and see the quotes it's the best it's it's not about he by the way peter literally has speech so when he has a point he'll go on tour and he'll give his speech universities are a bubble and it's not that he just said that off the cuff it's like he has a point of view that actually the universities there's something going on with them and it's there's sort of a a a a a weird thing going on that's what he does and then his speech traders are like so are you saying that universities are a bubble yeah yep nailed that cool headline alright great what's the what's the up head right and so he he gets it basically workshop himself and his team and then he literally goes on he's done this in a couple times he did it with the zero to one thing which is that and he does he uses a provocative statement so he says universities are bubble something that he knows is gonna basically it's a head turner your sales or new thing nba students are have negative impacts on new companies yeah or he'll say by the time the nba are in the alpha is gone right like once the mba nba are flooding into a space the opportunity is gone but the bigger one that he did was when he did his book zero to one he went on tour instead of saying buy my book on peter t i've had a great business success you know i've shared some of my less it competition is bad competition for losers yeah okay and he's like oh get this idea and capitalism that you know competition it brings out the best in us no competition for losers he said the only goal of a business is shoot for monopoly boom monopoly i thought that's illegal you literally you get broken up if you're a monopoly he's like exactly so he finds the head turning thing and when he has it he builds like a pretty convincing case so he did this with the teal fellowship and he paid kids to drop out a school like wow what a what the worst influence you could have on my child is convincing them to drop out of school drop out of their education how many kids a year do it you know i remember i hosted them at my office i think the first or second year of the teal fellowship and there was like twenty kids in it ish there's was like so his twenty like nineteen year olds or eighteen year olds were like at my office and i was like who who are you guys are you they're like we don't no who's super disorganized by the way and peter t was not there alright so i apply i apply and one of to peter till team members flex however many people you said six or eight people mh they why you the money and they just said did they say come back to me with three months with a thing no no at the top i don't know what it is now but at the time you would get accepted you would drop out they'd give you the money you would come to san francisco and you'd participate in the batch and so you live there i don't know if you lived together but they were all i mean they all shut off in my office so there was definitely there for at least a period of time i'm not sure if it was the whole program or what but it was pretty open ended and it was long does the hundred grand go towards starting your company or it a hundred thousand dollars plus three months of rent to two year hundred thousand grant for young people who wanna build new things instead of sitting in a classroom nice twenty or thirty people per year you gotta be twenty two or younger to do it you'll need to drop out in order to have it you don't have to move to san francisco and an idea is enough that's that was the idea of it it's been going for right i don't know ten years now so here's some of the notable recipients so the ceo and founder a dylan field of fig which is fifty billion dollar company i think is it tens of billions of company then there's o rooms which was like a a hotel style startup out of india that also was worth many many billions there's austin austin russell the guy who created lu technologies which i think it became the youngest billionaire ever it was like self driving and then of course the founder of ethereum which is a who knows hundreds of billions of dollars value creation thing then there's the founder of loom i didn't know that which was a startup up that was acquired for hundreds of millions of dollars the josh about router from do not pay which i and then there's like other things that i don't even know about because they maybe they're not for profit but there's like a guy who created a software to detect parkinson's disease and then there's a handful of like recipients like that where maybe they're behind the scenes doing amazing stuff so i guess it's been a very he probably didn't do it for money but if he wanted to there was a a return on it but there was definitely a return on like i encouraged value creation right oh yeah i if even one of those if just a ethereum had come out of it i mean smashing if just fig my head come out of it smashing success right so those are like the two power law winners of the thing by the way go to musk foundation dot org because i just saw that elon musk was the biggest donor he donated i think two million dollars to that vas challenge so daniel gross in that friedman put up to and the musk foundation put up two million describe what you see alright so musk foundation dot org it's a website with no design it's a blank piece of paper with five bullet points and it says musk foundation grants are made in support of renewable energy human space exploration pediatric research science and an engineering education development of viral artificial intelligence to benefit humanity that's it it's like hello world page yeah yeah it's basically a hundred words bullet pointed on a white piece of paper and this is one of the like extreme like you know money talks wealth whispers things yeah i could see sexy ind like that's what we're gonna call this where you want people to know that you don't care but you also want them to know that you don't care because you're cool yes so i'm gonna call it a sexy ind it's the homeless billionaire paradox right yeah yeah yeah the difference between a homeless man and a billionaire at face value is so small in san francisco you will not be able to tell the difference right it's and the takeaway being sometimes you could just be sexy and different in the very beginning and you become successful like you could just like but so we're gonna call it sexy and difference i saw a linkedin the other day that was no profile photo one line bio one job experience twenty six years owner and i was like here's a man who's gonna leave a lot of money for his children yeah you told you at right now i don't know anything about this company name never heard of this guy i can tell you right now this guy gonna leave up a lot of money to shoulder you don't get twenty six years owner no profile photo linkedin that's that's such a high signal thing to do or at worst he owns a really nice lake house or again he's broke it's almost we don't know actually if there is a go either throw way but it's one way or the other by the way i bought the peter t shirt from the joe rogan pod i'm gonna wear next week on the pod it was like a hundred and twenty dollar shirt right the the all white mesh net peter teal shirt from from sac and just i'm just teasing it right now subscribe on subscribe on youtube and you'll get to see me where that i it's made for hairy people mesh usually he's not not a great choice for us but yeah he you won't go up like six or seven points in my way you're gonna look like human velcro with all these like little threads sticking out i saw people talking about his shirt i thought it was pretty funny he he also had the the nazi haircut which is like totally in which is like you you do like a a a high fade my i fade and he it he looked good yeah he looked good i thought he looked great he looked great weather but other than that he's he seems to be on like kind of a a a a bit of a rejuvenation kick well he i mean he's like how does he's like fifty six he's alright he he can he can look fifty six but he looks great he looks a little bit younger than fifty six but if you've heard of cool contest like this or even a cool name for what this is called tweet at me i'm at the sam park because the stuff is very fascinating to me and i'm trying to understand like the economics of it because i think i might actually do it so are you going fifty fifty with me on the the msa scholarship i'm not wanting to commit to that yet i hear but i i'm trying to do it look i i'm a slower person you i'm thinking like the par family like where where gonna to go but oh dude the par four use a golf pun it's pretty yeah i gotta figure out something what did you call it par four yeah the par four but you i can't decide if you wanna go cheeky or like extra serious like when you look at the nobel peace prize like they're wearing like those like the suits with the tails you know what i mean well you know how it is you're you know what you're gonna do you're gonna go cheeky on the front end deadly serious on the execution i feel like that's you i think that's what we might do but i i like i told we had the conversation with like a with my wife i'm like i i because like we actually have to sign documents and i'm like should we do something like this and what what are what are we gonna do what are what do are gonna right now i'm i'm dude i was i'm obsessed with like single motherhood because like have you ever has your wife like whenever you gotta like be a single parent for the today like when your wife's gone or whatever i'm like this isn't impossible yeah it's impossible it's not i'm like how do you it actually can't be done so that's my so i'm like if you're a single mother how do you get ahead like you know if you wanna like it's so it's like a cycle so anyway i'm i'm like obsessed at that problem right now i'm trying to figure out how to how we could contribute to making their those people's lives better alright what do wanna do i'll give you a simple useful lesson learned from elon musk and jeff bezos okay somebody asked elon about hiring they go elon when you do you interview people still and when you interview them for hiring do you what do you ask them how does elon musk filter for great talent have you ever seen what he said no i i well i've heard one thing where he says if i'm talking to someone and my and like you know once in while like forty five seconds in and you could be like oh this is a bad match he's like i just act on that so like if sixty seconds i'll just like hey i don't wanna talk anymore and he just walks away it's like his version of like getting a haircut with headphones in yeah let me look he's like no so what he said was tell me about the toughest problems you've dealt with and how you dealt with those at your last company project he like this question because it filter out filters out canada who haven't actually done anything and you could ask them very detailed question about it and they will know the answer whereas the person who was not actually responsible for doing the thing won't know the details and so it's a very quick filtering mechanism other questions that came from other people so steve jobs used to ask why are you here and so he's like i wanna understand their motivation why are you even at why do why are you here for this interview why this company why this job why you is the the most important thing that steve jobs said i know that jeff bezos asked a question about do you consider yourself a lucky person i was gonna say i interviewed with joe deb the founder of airbnb and he was like a the last person who says fifteen minutes and the only question he asked me was on a scale one to ten how lucky are you and what'd did you say i said i'm a nine i go you know i'm lucky for a variety of reasons and i explained them and then i said i don't know if it's luck or what it is but like i i seem to get my way a lot and he and i go why'd you asked that and he said well because it looks real i wanna be around lucky people and even if it's not real i wanna be around people who tend to get their way yeah exactly and i was like alright that's i guess that's good said dan rose who worked for bezos in the early days think like nineteen ninety nine to two thousand six so he's a fun person to read about yeah he's a good follow on on twitter as well because he share some good like personal stories from the base area so he's he'll be like in ninety nine we were struggling with this and we were sitting at our office and he's still in the stair well because we didn't have time for make desks i got nice so he goes jeff bezos favorite interview question was are you a lucky person it was a great way to filter for optimus and people who manifest success because if you're a successful optimistic person the humble leader right answer for this starts with i'm the luck person on earth i've worked really hard to get where am but a lot of things had to go right for me and i've taken full advantage of my luck that's essentially like not the exact words but that is the crux of what you want them to say which is i've worked really hard but it took a tremendous amount of luck and i take advantage of lucky breaks when they present themselves to me and it goes sorting for optimistic people is a good proxy for leadership potential likelihood of success perceiving yourself as lucky is a proxy for optimism basically people will always tell you they're you know they're optimistic about things but they won't always say that they're lucky so it's kind of like a stealth question to to get at the optimism goes the humility part is also important it's it's easy to filter out false humility fumble brag are very obvious when you ask follow questions he goes this isn't the only question but it's a conversation starter and it opens the door to someone's personality beyond their resume there's two wrong answers number one no i'm i've i've never really gotten lucky you but i've been able to overcome and out work all the bad things that happened to me and no i never needed luck because i'm better smarter stronger faster than everybody else and there's a third answer which is like no i i've been pretty unlucky in which case it's like i don't wanna be around unlucky people like done yeah like i wanna be around you yeah yeah and that's what joe that's what joe told me he was like if you're really lucky you're either lux real in which case i would be around you or you just make it work and if you're say a one or two you're either unlucky lux real i don't wanna be around that shit either or you just they you're a victim and i don't wanna be around that so that that's how he explained it to me have you and i and i thought it was weird by the way i i thought it was weird at the time looking back i think it was better i actually interviewed also at google years ago they asked me like how many days would it take you to like clean the windows on like a skyscraper or something like that and i didn't like that question i hated that question you one thing that interview questions if another way to think about them is they're meant to filter out certain people and they're meant to pull in other people right so a great interview question will not just assess the person they will either attract or repel the wrong cultural fit so i think one of the google things is like part of the reason i would hate that question is part of the reason they don't wanna hire me right like that they want basically pulls puzzle solving nerds and i heard this put really well so max le i think was was the one that you know the creative paypal he was talking about he goes when i got acquired by google i was like how do they retain smart people here because they're trying to hire the most brilliant people on earth and then they're telling them go like tweak the knob on google adsense go get us like a little edge it's like not only is that soul list but it is like literally like almost the definition of a cog in the machine and he goes the way they keep those people around is he's he's like literally in the bathrooms they would have like really hard puzzles on the stalls he's like they would give people like a crazy they had twenty percent time which is like twenty time just we'll go work on whatever the hell you want like they would have puzzles on the walls in in the stall because the actual work that we needed you to do would never like it's not like mission driven enough it's not hard enough to like intellectually stimulate used so they had all these other ways of intellectually stimulate you and to cuddle you like we'll do your laundry we'll feed you well nurse you well you need a bath go ahead their sponge bath over there on the right they would do everything they could to keep talent there and one of the things that he talked about was like you know the paypal mafia is probably the most successful early group of people to come together in silicon valley right they they basically created you know they had elon they had peter t they had max they they went on to create like i don't know ten plus billion dollar companies out of the like first fifteen people there yeah like this for the smallest things of the paper mafia was like a yelp yeah exactly you like the guy at yelp is like you know sitting at the kids table at their were no offense jeremy so he's a good dude so so the thing with paypal was they treated it they they we're trying to create a cult they go the idea of diversity is not what you wanted a startup now you couldn't really say this today but they're on the record of saying this a long time ago which is that you want a certain type of person because that breeds a certain type of culture so you you know pick the culture and then you only wanna attract people that are gonna like reinforce that culture and you wanna like immediately like repel otherwise smart people who would dilute dilute that culture and so for him i remember there was a famous one which was they're were interviewing an engineer and the guy said you know they're like what you like to do outside of work and he's like love playing basketball and they vas was like i don't wanna hire this guy they're like what because he plays basketball he's like i've never met a great engineer who love who says he loves to play pick hoops he's like great engineers have other hobbies and he's like and he's like even if we're wrong it's the thing that monique said on the podcast mon bryce said when he met warren buffett he goes warren you're a great judge of people how do you do it man how did you get your people radar so good he goes i don't think i a good people radar he goes what i have is a very tight filter he goes so if you take me to a cocktail party when you'd let me talk to a hundred people for five minutes each in that five minutes i could probably take the the worst five or seven people and i'll tell you these people are lousy me don't hire them and the best five or seven people i could probably tell you them is like and then the other you know eighty five ninety people i don't know i couldn't make a judgment on in five minutes it wasn't obvious to me so i put them all in the no pile you well isn't that like a little harsh know they was there might be some great people there goes yeah but the cost of bringing a not great person into my circle of life is so high the cost of dis discarding somebody who might be great is nothing is a is so low comparatively he's like so i am willing to be a very harsh grader of people meaning you're either obviously in or i put you in the too hard to tell bucket and i just lump you in with all the obvious nose and that was a a non obvious insight from warren buffett that's a very or there are freaks like a peter tl or mark like a bird who who kinda nailed that harsh ness early on and then there's normal people like me and i'm sure you were like this where yeah do you find like a your twenty two year old and i'm like i don't know maybe they're promising maybe they were nervous at that interview maybe they were this maybe they were this and it feels good to give the underdog a shot oftentimes that narrative isn't that doesn't end the way that you like it to end like the like the people who that underdog narrative has work have worked for me it's someone like steps smith where let's hypothetically say she didn't do well in the interview but she was so awesome because i saw her blog and i'm like this person's like quirky and interesting like hypothetical there as if eddie was gonna believe that was a hypothetical well no what i mean is like i think she i don't remember the interview i think she did great like i was into her because i just read her like because i read her blog i'm like oh you have some type of it factor now maybe i wasn't sure how that it factor could be deployed or used to my benefit or whether it's like like if it was gonna be used like if she was actually gonna like just become the best at like blogging or if she's gonna become a best the best business woman i'm not sure but there were some type of like kernel of like fire there was a fire where i don't know how i'm gonna harness they can new harness whatever but there was something there whereas i've hired a lot of people who who did they didn't exactly have that they didn't have a fire there but i was like maybe it's there and i make these stupid decisions and it doesn't work because you wanna be a good person or whatever and it it doesn't work what what's that phrase no good deed goes un punished that's how it felt with a lot with a lot of my hiring decisions yeah you don't wanna face the confrontation of it you don't wanna admit that you wrong you don't wanna go back to square one and try to find somebody again you don't wanna admit to your team that you were wrong on this there's a whole bunch of very understandable reasons why we make this mistake they tell you how bunch of trouble lot of it which a lot of the m ended up being babies like a lot of the m people ended up being like like it was there were and no was just air in the yeah yeah it always it an app always stayed in air alright sorry what were we saying i got a lot of trouble at because when i was there i tweeted out something that was very true for me and i think it's true but the coo and others didn't like it i said something to the effect of you always know in the first two weeks if someone's gonna be great great people are great right off the bat they show you greatness in the first two or three weeks i've never seen or you know rarely ever will you ever see somebody who turns out to be great that just was in the first two three weeks and they yelled at you yeah they were like that's not i mean different people started at different pace paces and know that you know that's not basically they were kinda they took it as almost like that's too harsh and somehow it was like seen as like not diverse like oh there's a group of people who are slower to acc who yelled that you hr did m coo responded to the tweet i was like i do not like you know stand by this in fact i blah blah blah since then i've seen a bunch of other people say the exact same thing bunch of other like you know successful say say the same thing so kind of in some ways validated this like opinion how do you first firsthand experience i had which was the great people show greatness very early on first two weeks i tend to know if there's just gonna be a winner now that doesn't mean that somebody can't be a solid contributor that had a slow first couple of weeks but they're never the ones who are great and great is all i'm really looking for right the warren buffett be a heart's greater that is some of the best advice you can get how do you spell because that would be your reply to them just a fart noise it's like when they reply to like you're not supposed to do that it's like come i just said my point exactly and then they're were like what that's a ridiculous thing to think because the company was probably founded on that principle i don't know ami but i've seen his interviews he seems like a particular like pretty hardcore at for sure i imagine he was like that early on and so that company was probably founded with that principle of mind we have this all the time and and my my my team so ben who's my business partner we we will have some interaction with somebody and he'll be like what do you think of how that's going with that person like maybe it's a company being invested in and then we like talk to the ceo and they were like i don't really know exactly it kind of like like they they've been really slow to take action or they were saying all kinds of weird stuff that didn't make any sense or we hire somebody junior and then he's like how how's it going with what's someone and so so far and it's like dude if you have to ask you know right like that's the first first principle she you have to ask you know and i'm and i'll say something pretty harsh i'm like well i don't know we talked about doing these three things and then those three things haven't happened and there's been no update on them in in a week so i don't know how do you think it's going ben and he's like yeah and he'll usually say them because ben that one of the great things about ben is ben generous interpretation almost everybody like his wife will yell at him and he'd be like i mean maybe i could've have been a little more present right that's his first reaction you know where yeah most people get to that you know but the first reaction is you know somewhat well you you that's unfair that doesn't make any sense you did this blah right people get defense and whatever he doesn't really do that it doesn't blame he gives a generous interpretation of people which is why i think every loves ben but at the same time in a company like it's a really harsh hard way to run a company because sometimes been like so do you think we should be making excuses for like do you think like great people just like have all these excuses and reasons why they're not just like being great right now or are they just great in spite of circumstances it's like obviously great people are great in spite of circumstances versus people are bogged down in the ten maybe reasons why they're struggling right now and right and so i'm definitely but but that attitude that has served me in the workplace doesn't serve me outside of the workplace because you know having a generous interpretation for people outside of work is a really awesome train as a leader in a company it tends to actually not works so well the same way that democracy is great democracy inside a company where everybody gets vote on what we're doing is not a great way to build a company like companies are ben evelyn dictatorship when they win and you have to be comfortable being a ben evelyn dictator there but the dictator might not work in other areas of your life yeah and and that's why a lot of the most successful people are fucking assholes is you have either the four times divorced or whatever it's because what makes you great at one thing can make you shitty on another thing alright i enjoyed that conversation is that the pod that's the pod that's the pod oh sam how many diapers you changed it per day right now personally which your dp yeah for the up until recently it was here comes alive by the way at least one a day divide by two now it's one every three days look every day wow that is pretty incredible we have a nanny how how happy are you with the nanny very you know a nanny tends to be a nanny for the whole family so like she does our laundry she'll cooks a little bit she'll clean i usually work at the kitchen table with headphones in and so i'm always present like every thirty minutes i take my headphones out and i go and play so the nanny my my goal was done make sure my child does not have a jamaican accent you threw curve and their but your like goal was for your kid to not have a jamaican accent like i didn't want someone else to do all of the raising of my child i you know what i mean oh you you did a copywriting move there that was nice i like yeah so if my kids if naomi ever says jam on i'm gonna be like shit i need to be involved yeah i've been i'm working over i feel like i could rule to where to know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days all on a go less travel never looking back